1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for interfacing with a network adaptor supporting a plurality of devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a network environment, a network adaptor on a host computer, such as an Ethernet card, Fibre Channel card, etc., will receive Input/Output (I/O) requests or responses to I/O requests initiated from the host. Often, the host computer operating system includes a device driver to communicate with the network adaptor hardware to manage I/O requests to transmit over a network. The device driver requires significant host processor resources to handle network transmission requests to the network adaptor. One technique to reduce the load on the host processor is the use of a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/Internet Protocol (IP) Offload Engine (TOE) in which the TCP/IP protocol related operations are supported by the network adaptor hardware as opposed to the device driver, thereby saving the host processor from having to perform the TCP/IP protocol related operations. The transport protocol operations include packaging data in a TCP/IP packet with a checksum and other information, and unpacking a TCP/IP packet received from over the network to access the payload or data.
A network adaptor may be capable of handling traffic for different transfer protocols. For each protocol the network adaptor supports, the host operating system may load a different software device driver to enable the operating system to interface with the network adaptor with respect to that protocol. Each device driver would then transfer packets to the network adaptor for further processing and transmission.